


play your part

by la_victorienne



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-28
Updated: 2009-01-28
Packaged: 2018-10-16 01:01:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10560730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_victorienne/pseuds/la_victorienne
Summary: jack is on the millenium centre again.





	

O Winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire,  
What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn  
Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn  
Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire  
The streams than under ice. June could not hire  
Her roses to forego the strength they learn  
In sleeping on thy breast. No fires can burn  
The bridges thou dost lay where men desire  
In vain to build.  
O Heart, when Love's sun goes  
To northward, and the sounds of singing cease,  
Keep warm by inner fires, and rest in peace.  
Sleep on content, as sleeps the patient rose.  
Walk boldly on the white untrodden snows,  
The winter is the winter's own release.  
\--Helen Hunt Jackson  
A Calendar of Sonnets: January

There’s something so inherently different about Cardiff in winter, so far removed from the thick heat of her summer Jack wonders if she’s a different city altogether. On the roof of the Millennium Centre as usual he feels the chill cut across his shoulders, through his knees, a familiar pain that rings clearer within him than the memory of Rose’s laugh. Hands in his pockets, greatcoat buttoned, collar turned up, he lets the gust assault him, brightening his cheeks and numbing the tip of his nose – as much as it can be numbed, anyway, before regaining feeling of its own accord. He used to think he would never get used to the disconcerting sensation of his cells performing acts ten times more rapidly than any normal person’s, but after two thousand years of it being the only thing he could feel, he might actually have accepted it as a fact of life – well, as a fact of his life, such as it is.

Which, in point of fact, is why he’s up here: his life is strange and unusual and unconventional, and every so often the world turns so slowly he’s liable to forget that. Even engrossed as he is in the day to day workings of a secret government agency, complacency sets in, and that’s when he climbs up the stairs and jumps the barriers until he’s here, until he’s free. Free to think, free to not think, free to shout and cry and breathe, not that he does any of these things while he’s here, because he doesn’t have to, and that’s the point. The air is sharp, the night is long, and Jack is alive.

He hears a footstep behind him and twirls, senses all the more acute up here on the top of the world. It’s Ianto – it’s always Ianto who finds him where he retreats. Ianto half-waves where he stands and steps forward, treading carefully on the icy roof. Jack considers, sets his mouth, and lets him come. There’s nothing complacent about this.


End file.
